The company’s data editor trawls through billions of queries to deliver a portrait of the world’s preoccupations

As anyone who has procreated this century knows, childrearing involves daily rounds of online searching. The most common parenting-related queries feature in What We Ask Google, a valiant attempt by the search giant’s data editor Simon Rogers to create a “surprisingly hopeful picture of humankind” (that’s the subtitle) from searches performed over the past two decades. “Why do babies get hiccups?” we ask. “When do babies teethe?” “Why do toddlers bite?” “How do you know if your child has ADHD?” “How to tell kids about divorce?”

Since 2006, engineers have used Google Trends to make sense of common (and anonymised) queries like these, going back as far as 2004, when phones were dumb and less than half of UK households had internet access. Rogers, a British former Guardian journalist based in California, views the results as a kind of social mirror.

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Calaminarian grassland is a rare habitat where plants thrive in soils contaminated by heavy metals. But should these toxic meadows be protected or allowed to fade away?

At first, the small purple flowers are hard to spot in the weak May sunshine. Slowly the drifts of delicate mountain pansies, along with the white rosettes of alpine pennycress, begin to jump out, scattered across an area little bigger than a football pitch, on the banks of the River Allen in Northumberland.

This is a pocket of calaminarian grassland, an increasingly rare habitat where specialist plants called metallophytes have adapted to live in soils deeply contaminated by heavy metals, the legacy of more than 1,000 years of lead mining.

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Dong Guangping has tried to escape on several previous occasions after been jailed for his activism in China

A Chinese dissident has washed up on the shores of South Korea after attempting to flee China in a rubber boat.

Dong Guangping, 68, is in custody in South Korea, having been detained by the coastguard on Monday evening. He is thought to have travelled more than 30 hours by sea to reach the shores of China’s democratic neighbour.

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Madrid’s third club thrive on underdog mentality and still play in the daring style of former coach Andoni Iraola

“Rayo Vallecano is love, humility, toil,” says Óscar Trejo, the captain who handed in the armband in solidarity with workers at the club.

The striker Sergio Camello calls them “the last team from another time, special for what they fight for and what they fight against”. And, Álvaro García agrees, this could be the best, unlikeliest story ever told: the winger, 5ft 5in and lightning like the bolt across their shirt, Rayo’s all-time top scorer on 36 first division goals, has lived relegation and promotion but nothing like this. None of them have. “We’ve transformed from Rayito [little Rayo], to el puto Rayo [Rayo fucking Vallecano],” says Óscar Valentín, the midfielder leading them out in Leipzig. “People always saw us as the small club that couldn’t.”

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The co-hosts are likely to put pragmatism above style under Javier Aguirre in a home atmosphere that can be both an inspiration and a burden

This article is part of the Guardian’s 2026 World Cup Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 48 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from three countries each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 11 June.

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Tourists and locals in Madrid, Paris, London, Dublin and Berlin share their experiences of the unseasonable May temperatures

In recent days across parts of Europe, temperatures have soared, heat records have been broken and spring has felt more like the height of summer. Météo France, the French national weather service, has attributed this to a “heat dome”, with warmth held in place by a high-pressure weather front that has produced temperatures more than 10C above what used to be usual for this time of year.

Human-caused climate breakdown is supercharging extreme weather around the world, driving deadly extremes that can strike at abnormal times in unusual places and claim lives.

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AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Mensen van 75 jaar en ouder betalen steeds vaker met een pinpas aan de kassa. Dat blijkt uit een jaarlijks onderzoek van Betaalvereniging Nederland en De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB). Ook bij overboekingen aan vrienden en familie stijgt het aantal elektronische betalingen fors.

Ondanks dat 75-plussers nog relatief veel gebruikmaken van contant geld, rekent de groep inmiddels bijna driekwart van zijn betalingen aan de kassa met een pinpas af. Bij onderlinge betalingen aan bijvoorbeeld familie en vrienden of informele activiteiten doen zij dit voor het eerst vaker elektronisch dan contant (51 procent tegenover 49 procent).

Nederlanders betaalden in totaal in 2025 iets minder vaak aan de kassa dan in 2024. Het lagere aantal van 7,1 miljard transacties was wel goed voor een groter totaalbedrag: 185 miljard. Het aantal pinbetalingen onder alle Nederlanders bleef ongeveer hetzelfde, terwijl het aantal contante betalingen wat lager was. Het aandeel contante betalingen daalde naar 17 procent.

Gidi Markuszower heeft zich met zijn uitspraken over geweld tegen Palestijnse vluchtelingen "buiten de constructieve krachten geplaatst", vindt premier Rob Jetten. Maar ondanks herhaalde verzoeken van onder anderen Jesse Klaver van GroenLinks-PvdA spreekt de premier niet expliciet uit dat hij samenwerking met de radicaal-rechtse politicus uitsluit.

Klaver vindt het jammer dat de minister-president hiermee "toch nog de deur openhoudt". Esther Ouwehand van Partij voor de Dieren vindt de opstelling van Jetten "verbijsterend". Ze vindt dat de D66'er "zo iemand geen ruimte moet geven". Anders werkt hij "mee aan de normalisering van extreemrechts en het gevaar voor Nederland".

In een filmpje van mediakanaal Left Laser deed Markuszower de omstreden uitspraak dat "maximaal geweld" mag worden gebruikt om Palestijnse vluchtelingen tegen te houden. Achteraf zei hij geweld door de Koninklijke Marechaussee te bedoelen en dat hij dit "onhandig verwoord" had, zonder afstand te nemen van zijn uitspraken.

"Dit is de strategie van extreemrechts. Je zegt dingen die je echt vindt. En als je er last van krijgt, dan ga je zeggen dat je ze net iets anders had bedoeld. Maar het signaal was duidelijk", luidt de lezing van Ouwehand.

Eerder in het debat spraken coalitiepartijen D66, VVD en CDA eveneens hun afschuw uit over de uitspraken van Markuszower. Maar ook zij sloten samenwerking met Markuszower niet categorisch uit. Eerder kon de coalitie de hulp van de fractie van de afgesplitste PVV'er goed gebruiken om te voorkomen dat de verhoging van de AOW-leeftijd werd afgeserveerd. Het kabinet heeft overigens uiteindelijk zelf afgezien van dat plan

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De AEX-index op de aandelenbeurs in Amsterdam is woensdag iets hoger geopend, na de verliesbeurt een dag eerder. AkzoNobel was een opvallende stijger op het Damrak. Het verfconcern, dat gaat fuseren met de Amerikaanse branchegenoot Axalta Coating Systems, verwierp onlangs een overnamebod van het Japanse Nippon Paint en het Amerikaanse Sherwin-Williams. Volgens AkzoNobel, bekend van merken als Dulux, Sikkens en Flexa, wordt doorgegaan met de fusie met Axalta.

De koers van AkzoNobel steeg ruim 16 procent tot meer dan 61 euro per aandeel. Het bod van Nippon Paint en Sherwin-Williams bedroeg 73 euro per aandeel in contanten en werd op 29 april ingediend. AkzoNobel verwierp het bod op 1 mei omdat het te laag was. Het bedrijf blijft de fusie met Axalta aanbevelen bij de aandeelhouders.

De AEX noteerde kort na opening een plus van 0,2 procent op 1044,72 punten. Op dinsdag daalde de hoofdindex nog meer dan 1 procent.

OKLAHOMA CITY (ANP/AFP) - Titelverdediger Oklahoma City Thunder heeft nog één zege nodig om opnieuw de finale van de Amerikaanse basketbalcompetitie NBA te bereiken. De Canadese sterspeler Shai Gilgeous-Alexander hielp de kampioen met 32 punten aan een 127-114-thuiszege op San Antonio Spurs. De ploeg uit Oklahoma City komt daardoor 3-2 voor in de finale van de Western Conference, met nog twee duels te gaan.

San Antonio Spurs speelde een slordige wedstrijd. De Franse vedette Victor Wembanyama was goed voor 20 punten, maar benutte slechts vier van zijn vijftien pogingen uit open spel. Ook aanvaller Devin Vassell kon zijn ploeg niet zo goed helpen als in eerdere duels.

Oklahoma City Thunder kan zich donderdag in San Antonio verzekeren van de NBA-finale. Anders volgt een beslissend duel. New York Knicks plaatste zich maandag al voor de strijd om de titel.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De Koninklijke Marechaussee heeft vorige week dinsdag op Schiphol een medewerker van een vrachtafhandelingsbedrijf aangehouden die mogelijk gegevens uit bedrijfssystemen met criminelen heeft gedeeld. Dat heeft de marechaussee woensdag bekendgemaakt.

De 24-jarige Amsterdammer wordt verdacht van computervredebreuk. Volgens de marechaussee heeft hij vermoedelijk data doorgesluisd die criminelen konden gebruiken om drugs te vervoeren via Schiphol.

Nadat de verdachte was aangehouden, is ook zijn woning doorzocht. Daar heeft de recherche een vuurwapen, 11.000 euro in contanten en illegaal vuurwerk gevonden.

De man is vrijdag voorgeleid en zit nog vast.

Het ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken werkte in 2025 weer op alle mogelijke manieren aan een duurzame toekomst. Zo werkte het ministerie aan een emissiereductie van 40% ten opzichte van 2022 en aan het optimaal hergebruiken van producten, onderdelen en grondstoffen. In dit vierde Duurzaamheidsverslag staat alles over de duurzame doelen, de acties in 2025 en de plannen voor 2026.

THE REGISTER EXPLAINER Companies are increasingly running AI applications close to where data is generated and consumed. That means everywhere from branch offices to retail sites and industrial facilities. These use cases often share a key characteristic: They can't wait for a round trip to a hyperscale region. Why does cloud-first break at the edge? Processing data locally cuts the cost and delay of moving high-volume streams to the cloud while strengthening privacy and compliance, a calculus that sharpens as regulators move in. Frameworks like the EU AI Act demand auditabile inferencing for high-risk AI workloads. How does edge AI computing change security? Distributed sites expand the attack surface, which makes low-level hardware-based security and centralized policy control essential. HPE ProLiant edge servers embed a silicon root of trust in the iLO management chip to block compromised firmware. That kind of defense matters at edge locations, where malicious actors can physically reach hardware far more easily than at a hardened datacenter. While competitors use off-the-shelf chips, HPE designs its own baseboard management controller silicon for the role — a level of protection suited to threat surfaces that extend to the back office behind a cash register, on a manufacturing floor, or even a back office storage room. How can I keep my AI operating in non-datacenter environments? Datacenter hardware tends to fail amid dust, temperature swings, weak power and intermittent connectivity. The HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 is about half the depth of a DL365 and quiet enough at ~55 dB to sit in an office. With a new processor, this rugged unit supports GPU such as the NVIDIA RTX PRO™ 4500 Blackwell, tolerates temperature variations, and includes built-in air filtration. Can I manage edge AI at scale? HPE Compute Ops Management helps to manage distributed computing environments by providing global visibility from a cloud-native console. Administrators can deploy firmware updates, monitorhealth, and provision new edge servers. Forrester found that organizations using the tool spend up to 75 percent less time managing remote servers, with substantial savings in travel and manual effort. Treating the edge as a business-critical platform rather than a sprawl of isolated boxes lets AI initiatives scale without IT overhead scaling alongside. Whether you're running a vision system to spot defects on a manufacturing line or machine learning to flag operating anomalies on oil field equipment, AI runs more efficiently as it gets closer to the point of use. Choosing equipment that's physically resilient, secure and easy to manage will be the difference between edge excellence and distributed dystopia. Sponsored by HPE.

Today's links

• AI and a world without migrants: It's solipsism all the way down.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Manuscript rabbits; "What Will Come After"; Pastejacking; Terrorism phrenology; Vaccine waivers were promised 20 years ago.
• Upcoming appearances: London, Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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AI and a world without migrants (permalink)

I don't care who you are, there will always be times when hell is other people. Not because other people are horrible – quite the opposite! Other people are wonderful, but boy are they ever stubborn.

From boardgames to romance, team sports to movement politics, business ideas to construction projects, there's so much important, enjoyable and essential stuff you can't do alone. But other people insist on having their own priorities and goals, and they mulishly refuse to organize their lives to suit your priorities.

Our species has put a lot of work into resolving this conundrum. Not only did we evolve a whole brain structure – the neocortex – that helps us understand others' perspectives, but we also evolved many social structures (like laws and teams and governments and families and committees and bureaucracies) to help us coordinate with others to do superhuman things (that is, things that exceed the capacity of a single human).

These structures are imperfect, but they're better than the alternative: coercion. Persuading others is not without its pitfalls, but compared to forcing others to bend to your will, "persuasion" is the hands-down favorite.

Not for everyone, though. There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals rather than yours. We call most of those people "toddlers" and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief.

But there's another group of people who carry this belief into adulthood. If they're of regular means, we call those people "bullies." However, if they're sufficiently wealthy, we call them "billionaires" (this is the same force that allows money to transmute a "hoarder" into a "collector").

Just lately though, we've come up with a new solution to the problem of hell being other people. Rather than coercing other people into arranging their affairs to suit our needs, we've devoted trillions of dollars to replacing people with pliant chatbots, in the hopes that these chatbots can be made so effective that we can just dispense with other people altogether.

Many everyday people have replaced their romantic partners with chatbots ("AI boyfriends"/"AI girlfriends"), and they've formed active communities to revel in the delights of pursuing love with someone who demands no moral consideration or compromise, glorying in a world of love without lovers:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16215328-e1-love-bots

There's a whole community of people who have stopped listening to music created by people in favor of made-to-order slop, exulting in a world of music without musicians:

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937059/nobody-wants-to-tell-me-why-they-only-listen-their-own-suno-slop

These are foundationally solipsistic exercises, fantasy worlds in which you are the only real person and everyone else is a bot, an NPC, a phantom. AI has democratized solipsism, a privilege that was once the exclusive purview of billionaires, whose belief that most other people weren't fully real let them inflict the kind of mass pain on millions that is a prerequisite for amassing a truly vast fortune:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

No surprise then that billionaires were easy marks for AI hustlers, who promised the possibility of a world without people, where an army of "agents" could do the jobs that presently demand the contributions of unreasonable human beings who refuse to acknowledge that your priorities trump theirs.

Jeff Bezos built the world's most advanced automated warehouses, and the workers in those warehouses are seriously injured at 300% of the national rate, and they are not allowed pee breaks (nevertheless, these workers unreasonably insist on metabolizing fluids and expelling the waste). The automation and the injuries aren't unrelated facts. The inhumane treatment is caused by the automation, because when you commit hundreds of billions to automation capex, you need to work those assets to recoup the investment. In a human/machine collaboration, humans will always be the bottlenecks. To maximize return on automation, you need to drive the human peripherals that serve the machines at the absolute limit of human endurance. Jeff Bezos's machines don't just use humans, they use them up:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

Billionaires poured trillions into AI because they are obsessed with the fantasy of a world without people. Mark Zuckerberg would like to replace your on-platform friends with chatbots. Sure, your friends are the reason you're stuck on his platforms, but your friends are stubborn and thus suboptimal. Remember: hell is other people, so while your friends unreasonably refuse to leave Facebook with you and follow you to another platform (this is bad for you, but good for Zuck), they also refuse to organize their social media lives to "maximize your engagement" and thus the number of ads you see (which is bad for Zuck). By replacing your friends with chatbots, Zuck hopes to reinvent social media without the socializing:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/17/for-youze/#forever

Billionaires are betting that bosses (and other would-be billionaires) will spend trillions buying AI products, captured by the fantasy of a workplace without workers. They think AI could be the remedy for the ancient, nameless dread that bosses experience every time they contemplate the fact that if they don't show up for work, everything hums along fine; whereas if the workers don't show up, the whole enterprise collapses. Secretly, bosses are haunted by the fear that they're not driving the car, they're strapped into the back seat, amusing themselves with a toy steering-wheel:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

That's what the Hollywood strikes were about: studio bosses' fantasy of movies without actors and screenplays without screenwriters. Since the invention of the studio system itself, studio bosses have wrestled with the fact that talented people who are beloved by audiences have bargaining leverage, which they use to demand better outputs and higher wages (this is the same conundrum faced by hospital administrators confronting nurses and doctors, college administrators confronting faculty, etc):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/20/i-would-prefer-not-to/#i-cant-do-that-boss

This solipsistic drive is what powers investment in AI "persuasion" technologies, making billions for latter-day Cambridge Analyticas who peddle the outlandish tale of having built a mind-control ray. It's a winning sales-pitch because it plays into the fantasy of a world where customers do as they're told, organizing their lives according to your priorities, at the expense of their own wellbeing:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

It's not just captains of industry who are occupied with furious, all-consuming fantasies of a world without people. Dictators, autocrats and technocrats in the political world love AI because it dangles the possibility of a world without bureaucrats and public officials. If the civil service can be replaced with chatbots, then the will of the dictator can be translated directly into policy without any tedious negotiations with experts who understand how things work and have deep moral commitments to the public good:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

A world without people is especially attractive to politicians presiding over aging, declining nations whose most ardent voters have been convinced that migrants are a threat to their nation (rather than its salvation).

Objectively speaking, the only way that a rich country with an aging workforce can remain wealthy and powerful is by wooing working-age people from elsewhere to migrate to that country. Even if every tradwife is kept in a state of continuous gestation courtesy of a fertility-obsessed natalist, there's still going to be decades during which your wealthy, aging population will need young, skilled people to do all the essential labor. From picking crops, to staffing hospitals, to building homes, to filing lawsuits, to preparing tax-returns, your quiverfull child army will be too young to take over for years to come.

Trapped in the political impossibility of a country whose productive activities are absolutely reliant on young, strong, resourceful, skilled migrants, and a xenophobic political movement that scapegoats these migrants and revels in the spectacle of ethnic cleansing, politicians see AI as a way out of their double-bind. If migrants can be replaced with AI, then you can satisfy the racist sadism of your most ardent voters without shutting down the country for lack of workers.

In other words: in feeding the fantasy of a world without people, AI serves the fantasy of a world without migrants. Unlike gastarbeiters, bracero fruit-pickers and Saudi quasi-slaves, AI makes no demands, requires no moral consideration, and does not attempt to germinate a culture, a cuisine, or a language in your sacred soil.

This grotesque fantasy has always lurked in the subtext of the automation story. The plot of Disney's Big Hero 6 boils down to: "In future-America/Japan, it will be more politically possible to have robots look after our aging parents than it will be to welcome the millions of skilled health-workers in the Pacific Rim who are eminently qualified to do the job." Big Hero 6 is the solution to the problem of building a nursing home without nurses.

The wealthy have always dreamed of transforming the proletariat into the precariat: desperate workers who do as they're told. But in the automation story of which AI is the latest chapter (and purportedly the climax), the precariat becomes the unnecessariat: workers who are surplus to requirements and can be vaporized or liquidated or warehoused or simply ignored.

In the fantasy world of total automation, the owners of AI can make the world go around without any of us, which means that we will exist solely at their sufferance, and will therefore have to act like the NPCs they half-believe we are already, organizing everything we do around their priorities.

This is the foundation of Sam Altman's obsession with a biometrically controlled universal basic income. Altman can't stop fantasizing about a world in which all the productive work is done by his software, and the state's sole purpose is to supply us – the unnecessariat – with vouchers we can only redeem for services provided by Altman's robot army. It's charter schools for everything, with Altman at the top, all wrapped up in a layer of dystopian retinal scanning:

https://www.wired.com/story/worldcoin-sam-altman-orb/

Billionaires and would-be billionaires are absolute suckers for this solipsistic bullshit, because they genuinely don't think other people are real. They love "effective altruism" because it counsels them to make as much money as possible, without regard to how many people they cheat, hurt, or kill…provided that they pledge to use these ill-gotten gains to improve the lives of 10^53 imaginary artificial people who will come into existence in 10,000 years. After all, the total benefit of even the most infinitesimal welfare gains experienced by 10^53 people vastly exceeds all the pleasures that all eight billion actual, living people are capable of experiencing:

https://www.semafor.com/article/11/21/2023/how-effective-altruism-led-to-a-crisis-at-openai

It all makes perfect sense – provided you don't believe that other people are really, truly real.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• EU's digital sovereignty boo-boo may be the best thing to ever happen to the project https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/05/26/eus-digital-sovereignty-boo-boo-may-be-the-best-thing-to-ever-happen-to-the-project/5244715

• Revealed: Palantir’s NHS tech is ten times slower than current system https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-palantirs-nhs-tech-is-ten-times-slower-than-nhs-thiel-trump

• The human cost of governing by spreadsheet https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/21-05-2026/the-human-cost-of-governing-by-spreadsheet

• Canadian prime minister Mark Carney is not the climate guy you thought
  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/21/mark-carney-climate-canada

• It's time to talk about my writerdeck https://veronicaexplains.net/my-first-writerdeck/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago California prison overcrowding, in photos https://web.archive.org/web/20110525171353/https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/05/california-prison-overcrowding-photos

#15yrsago What Will Come After: the sweet melancholy of the zombie apocalypse https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/25/what-will-come-after-the-sweet-melancholy-of-the-zombie-apocalypse/

#10yrsago If Donald Trump ever talks to a real journalist, these are the questions he should answer https://www.nationalmemo.com/21-questions-for-donald-trump

#10yrsago Norwegian Consumer Council broadcasts live, marathon reading of app Terms of Service https://web.archive.org/web/20160526145553/https://www.forbrukerradet.no/vilkar-og-personvern-minutt-for-minutt/

#10yrsago Pastejacking: using malicious javascript to insert sneaky text into pasted terminal commands https://github.com/dxa4481/Pastejacking

#10yrsago Why medieval monks filled manuscript margins with murderous rabbits https://web.archive.org/web/20160614000551/https://jonkanekojames.com/2015/05/02/why-are-there-violent-rabbits-in-the-margins-of-medieval-manuscripts/

#10yrsago Students: court orders government agencies to offer educational discount on FOIA requests https://web.archive.org/web/20160525155102/https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160521/16031934508/appeals-court-tells-government-it-must-extend-educational-institution-foia-fee-price-break-to-students.shtml

#10yrsago The euphemisms news reporters use when a sports figure injures his penis and testicles https://web.archive.org/web/20160525125452/https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/media-groin-draymond-green-steven-adams/

#10yrsago Company says facial features reveal terrorists and pedophiles 80% of the time https://web.archive.org/web/20160525130941/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/05/24/terrorist-or-pedophile-this-start-up-says-it-can-out-secrets-by-analyzing-faces/

#5yrsago We promised this vaccine waiver 20 years ago https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
  https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow

• LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: TBA, Jun 23

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Philadelphia: TBA, Jun 25

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

• The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
  https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/

• Enshittification (99% Invisible)
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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In Rotterdam stonden vorig jaar 6500 woningen met een waarde van een miljoen euro of meer. De stad behoort daarmee tot de top vijf van gemeenten met de grootste absolute groei van het aantal miljoenenwoningen, zeggen onderzoekers van Calcasa.

​Furieus is hij. Jelle de Wit smelt bijna weg in zijn snikhete slaapkamer op het zuiden, terwijl de asielzoekers in Ter Apel lekker in de buitenlucht mogen slapen.

"Het is te gek voor woorden", puft Jelle in zijn koophuis in Nieuwegein. "Echte Nederlanders stikken zo'n beetje in die bloedhitte, terwijl nieuwkomers heerlijk de koelte van de Groningse nacht op hun huid mogen voelen. Kamperen onder de sterrenhemel, gratis en voor niets. Bij mij wordt volgende week gewoon de hypotheek weer afgeschreven. Het is de omgekeerde wereld."

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&

De afgelopen weken struikelden we over het alarmerende nieuws over sociale media.  De manosfeer is mainstream geworden. Tijdens verkiezingen neemt de online manipulatie snel toe. Valse beelden overspoelen het internet. In een verontrustend rapport stelt het Commissariaat voor de Media deze week dat sociale media – en in het bijzonder algoritmische aanbevelingen – een gevaar zijn voor onze democratie. Vaak wordt gezegddat de invloed […]

Het bericht Dat sociale media onze democratie schaden, is minder vanzelfsprekend dan het publieke debat doet vermoeden verscheen eerst op StukRoodVlees.

Het is weer zo'n dag waarop inwoners van ooit fraaie wijken van grote steden in de vroege uurtjes uit bed zijn gejengeld door gebedsoproepen en waarop inwoners van schaapskooien van hun stro worden gedreven (soort Nakba voor schapen) richting een bloederige schuur, badkamer of - in het beste geval - halalslachterij, om daar onverdoofd en tevens ritueel in de halsslagader te worden geprikt. Door heel Nederland veranderen voetbalvelden (zoals dat van de Alphense Boys hierboven) en openbare pleinen in een soort Opwekking maar dan net iets patriarchaler, oftewel het OFFERFEEST kan beginnen. Kunt u wel denken dat het allemaal heel zielig is voor die schaapjes (zie: dit mooie eerbetoon aan de gevallenen van vorig jaar) MAAR we lezen in confessionele kutkrant Trouw dat het dus allemaal VEEL MEER IS dan dierenleed. Gek dat het 'veel meer' in dat soort bafstukken nooit echt verder komt dan termen als BEZINNING en VERBONDENHEID, alsof we dachten dat moslims elkaar op hun feestdagen allemaal volstrekt onbezonnen en uiterst verdeeld doodvechten. (Wel nee, dat gebeurt dus vooral buiten hun feestdagen om.) Hoe dan ook, sterkte aan alles dat blaat en mekkert en FIJNE EID-AL-ADHD (of zo) aan u allen!

Ook namens de IND

Ook namens Israël

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BONGURI has added a photo to the pool:

知立の八橋エリアからほとんど離れていないけど、豊田市の小さな神社。
Photo taken at Hanazono area, Toyota city, Aichi pref.